John Saul - Black Lightning

Vivian leaned forward and her fingertips came ominously together again. “Then let me elucidate for you,” she said, putting just enough emphasis on the word “elucidate” to make it sting like the tip of a flicking whip. “It seems to me that your proper function in this particular story is interviewee rather than interviewer. As for the story itself, it reads far more like an editorial than even your usual stuff does, and unless you have a lot more backup material than I suspect you do, the whole thing reeks of supposition. You’re supposed to be a reporter, Anne. When I want opinion pieces from you, I’ll let you know.”

Anne felt a vein in her forehead throbbing, and hoped it didn’t show. “Would you like to tell me exactly where the problems are?”

“The whole tenor bothers me. To begin with, I don’t think you should be suggesting this is a serial killing. Until the police see some parallels between this Cottrell woman and—”

“This ‘Cottrell woman’ was my next-door neighbor,” Anne interjected, her voice rising in anger.

Vivian Andrews blinked. “Your neighbor?” she echoed. “Good God, Anne, what are you doing? You found your neighbor dead in Volunteer Park this morning, and you not only came to work, but you wrote about it, too?”

“Writing about things like this is my job,” Anne replied. “And as for parallels between this and Shawnelle Davis, I think there are plenty. For one thing, neither place seemed to be broken into—”

“Which proves nothing,” Vivian cut in. “You know as well as I do that half the people in the city still leave keys hidden all over the place.”

Anne dipped her head in acknowledgment of the criticism. “So they do. But it goes a lot further than that. Both women were butchered in the same way. Their chests were cut open and their hearts were cut out. Furthermore, they both lived on Capitol Hill, only a few blocks apart.”

“And one of them was a hooker and the other worked at Group Health. One was in her thirties, the other in her fifties. You know as well as I do that serial killers stick to a type—”

“Richard Kraven didn’t.”

“And nothing was ever proven against him in this state,” Vivian reminded her.

“Whether Richard Kraven was proven guilty in Washington State or not, he was a killer, and you know it as well as I do,” Anne flared. “And I’m just as sure that whoever killed Shawnelle Davis also killed Joyce Cottrell.”

“You were also sure that Shawnelle Davis’s death was somehow connected to Richard Kraven,” Vivian Andrews retorted. “I don’t get it, Anne. What are you trying to prove here? It seems as though you want to have it every way possible. If the Davis and Cottrell murders are connected to the ones you claim Richard Kraven committed, where does that leave Kraven? You claim he was guilty, but now it sounds as if you think someone else did it.”

“If he had an accomplice—”

“If he had an accomplice, don’t you think he’d have cut a deal? Call me cynical if you want to, but I’ve been around long enough to know that the first thing most of these creeps do who get hit with a murder charge, is blow the whistle on their friends! And if that doesn’t work, you pull a Menendez and blame the victims.”

Anne sank back into the chair as if the air had just been let out of her. “I know.” She sighed. “That’s what makes me so crazy. I don’t really believe Kraven had an accomplice. But I still think there’s some kind of connection.” Her eyes fixed on Vivian. “You haven’t seen the bodies, Viv. And I’ll admit I didn’t see Shawnelle Davis’s, but I saw pictures. It’s weird — they’re not like what Kraven did. They don’t have that surgical quality about them, as if they’d been dissected, but the mutilation is basically the same. It’s as if whoever killed Shawnelle and Joyce is trying to pick up where Kraven left off.”

Vivian Andrews’s lips pursed sourly. “That’s not reporting, Anne. That’s editorializing. And I don’t think I can let it go on any longer.” She rummaged around on the cluttered surface of her desk, found what she was looking for and handed it to Anne. “I’ll clean up your story and run it,” she said, “but that’s it. We run this paper on facts, not on speculation. So until something real happens that turns these two deaths into genuine serial killings, I want you to go to work on that.”

Anne looked down at the piece of paper in her hand. It was a notice of a planning meeting for a proposed regional light-rail system that would stretch from Everett to Tacoma, a proposal that had been endlessly kicked around among various governmental agencies for most of a decade. Anne looked at Vivian with utter disbelief. “This?” she asked. “You’re asking me to cover this?”

“I’m not asking at all,” Vivian calmly replied. “I’m ordering you to.”

The house was quiet.

Glen was asleep.

The Experimenter was not.

He explored the house in a more leisurely fashion than he had before; yesterday, and in the days before that, he had felt a sense of urgency, a need to make preparations. But yesterday, much of what he required had been procured, purchased, and brought into the house while Glen slept, stored carefully away in the basement, ready for his use when the time was ripe.

But not yet.

He was out of practice, and until he could once again perform his experiments perfectly, he wouldn’t perform them at all.

He had, after all, certain standards to maintain. Standards that had certainly not been maintained by the man he’d watched last night, the man who had carried a clumsily butchered victim through the darkness as if the simple absence of light would be enough to protect him from the consequences of what he had done.

It would not, of course. Soon — perhaps very soon — the Experimenter would administer a fitting punishment to the blundering imitator he had seen last night.

Today, though, he had other things to do. Today, while Glen slept and the house was quiet, he would begin brushing up on his skills, begin reacquiring the perfect manual dexterity he had lost in the years since events had required him to suspend his research. Thrilling to a growing sense of anticipation, the Experimenter finished his examination of the house, lingering only when he came to Anne Jeffers’s dresser. Opening each of the drawers, he ran his fingers over the soft satiny fabric of her lingerie.

In his mind he touched her skin.

A sigh built in the depths of his chest, and was finally expelled in a sound reminiscent of bellows fanning coals into fire. His fingers tightened for an instant, crushing the silk into a shapeless mass, but he quickly regained control of himself. Closing the drawer, the Experimenter left the room and went to the basement.

The purchases he’d made the day before — with the exception of the fishing rod Kevin had found — were hidden away in a battered footlocker he’d found supporting two boxes of dust-laden books. Moving the two boxes aside, taking care not to disturb the layer of dust that covered their tops, the Experimenter opened the trunk and took out several items: some nylon line, a spool of strong silken thread, some fishhooks, and a book. Carrying the items to the long workbench that stood against one of the basement’s walls, he set the items down and pulled the string that hung from the fixture suspended from the joists above. The light flickered for a second or two, then a bright fluorescent glow swept away the cellar’s shadowy gloom.

The Experimenter opened the book. It was a manual on fly-fishing, the hobby he had so often used to soothe the frustration that engulfed him when his experiments ended in failure. He began leafing quickly through the book until he found the section on hand-tied flies, then slowly turned the color plates one at a time. Though it would have appeared to an observer that he was only giving the illustrations cursory glances, the truth was exactly the opposite. In the second or two it took him to scan a page, his eyes took in every detail of the two dozen flies each plate displayed.